User Reviews (1 - 11 of 32)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Puzzlers should definitely buy this game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 17 / 17
Date: August 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am approaching this game as someone who is familiar with the pencil-and-paper (P&P) puzzles of the same type, such as those found in Games Magazine. This review will compare the P&P version to this video game.

I was looking for a DS video game that could keep me occupied on a transatlantic business trip, and had serious doubts that this game would work. The P&P version of this puzzle is somewhat fun but also quite tedious. If you're on the fence like me, I can wholeheartedly say: you should definitely buy this game.

This video game version provides several features which make this type of puzzle much more approachable to the new player (and, frankly, it makes it a lot more fun, too, by removing a lot of the tedium). Many of the puzzles are setup to automatically tell you if you've made a mistake. No more grueling over a puzzle grid for an hour only to find you've made a horribly intractable mistake and have to start from scratch! Instead, you're penalized via a time penalty when you make a mistake. Also, the game offers you a random hint on each puzzle before you start. So, new puzzlers will find these puzzles on the DS very approachable.

There are also plenty of features that simply blow away what you can do with P&P. These include:
* great visual themes
* nice music
* cute animations as reward for solving the puzzle
* automatically keeping track of which bars have been fully filled in
* nice variety of mini-games to break up the monotony
* multiplayer, both local and internet
* make your own puzzles & share them wirelessly
* convenient way to try out an assumption then accept/discard it
* stylus allows for brilliantly fast gameplay -- much faster than P&P

My primary complaint is that the game doesn't serve the needs of the hardcore player very well. Specifically, these points bothered me:
* no way to disable automatic checking for errors on easier levels
* the assumption-checking system doesn't allow for layered assumptions
* it also doesn't show you which spot was your initial key assumption
* arbitrary notation (e.g. custom notes & scribbles) is not possible
* puzzle grids are initially limited to 15x15 in size

I debated rating it 4 stars because of the hardcore limitations, but decided that the game really isn't trying to fill a hardcore niche. It does what it tries to do perfectly, which is to make "picross" puzzles incredibly fun to play. Rather than spending an hour grueling over a single tough paper puzzle, making complex notations possibly even using layered assumptions, you can whip through a "tough" puzzle on the DS in about 10 minutes. All the tedium is gone. You can fill in the grid on the DS as fast as you can think, which is an order of magnitude faster than you can fill in a paper grid. So, while there was a certain satisfaction in conquering the hardest of hardcore "picross" puzzles on paper, it was precisely those frictions which turned me off from them in the P&P world.

Bottom line: the P&P variety of this puzzle was never particularly compelling to me, but the DS version is a joy to play.

Picross DS rocks the house

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: August 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Picross DS is a straight-up Picross game. Thank you, Nintendo.

The upsides here are:

* Hand-held Picross goodness
* Many single player levels
* Awesome head-to-head Picross via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection
* Puzzle editor
* Share your own puzzles via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection
* (Supposed) downloadable Picross levels from the previous Nintendo Picross games that Nintendo has offered
* Low low price of $19.99.

The downsides here are:

* The downloadable games are all "coming soon"
* I am not at all happy with the zoom scheme they came up with for the larger puzzles. It's really hard to keep track of the big picture while you work, at least for me.

So as you can see, the score is 7 to 2 in favor of the upsides. I'm a happy (addicted) camper. It made me stop playing Planet Puzzle League at least. At roughly the same time this game came out, I stumbled across another Picross game.

The best $20 you can spend on a DS game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: September 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game after hearing people gush over it on podcasts and after playing a demo downloaded from a gamestop kiosk. I am sure glad I did.

This is a puzzle game where you uncover tiles to create a picture. For each row and column there are numbers indicating that there are x tiles in a row followed by at least one blank space, followed by y tiles, and so on and so forth. Using deductive reasoning you eliminate choices (by switching to the X mode) and see where you must punch out a tile. This is fairly easy when you are on a small grid (Easy mode generally is between 5x5 and 10x10) but it gets harder when you move to bigger grids (15x15, 20x20, 25x20).

Once you start playing normal mode, there are different levels, all sharing a common theme. For instance, there is a frozen/cold theme one where you might be punching out pictures of a snowflake, or a snowman for that matter. Each theme also has a color theme for the maps, or you can choose to play with a default background and punching sound.

This game is a phenomenal value for $20. I have been playing it for at least an hour a night before I go to bed almost every day for the past month at least, and I am not finished level 10 yet.

In addition to Easy mode and Normal mode, there is free play mode which I have yet to try. From what I understand, the game will not tell you if you make a mistake, whereas in normal and easy mode you immediately know when you make a mistake and have a substantial time penalty imposed against you. This makes it much more difficult.

There is also daily training (sort of like brain age in that it keeps track of your best times and displays them in graph form). As you play x number of days, new modes unlock.

Even if you are not planning to go online (as I haven't) or play free mode, this game absolutely deserves your purchase.

One of the best puzzlers ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: September 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If you like Sudoku or crossword puzzles, there's a good chance you'll love Picross DS. It's got so much content, including some great multiplayer modes. 3 music tracks are included - they're not very good, but at least you have the choice to use them, unlike Brain Age. Zooming in and out on the larger puzzles can be a hassle, but it's worth it for these brain benders. An absolute steal at twenty bucks.

Picross is my GOD

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: October 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Soooo addicting. It reminds me of logic problems. Once you get into the flow of it, doing a puzzle is relaxing. I only wish there were more extras to download besides the Mario ones.

My Favoriate Game Yet!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: November 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I've owned about 10 games or so for my DS so far, and this is by far my favorite. Usually I don't like puzzle type games but this game really grabbed me. I bought it and couldn't put it down untill I finished it completely.

I bought this game to play with my wife because the multi-player reviews were so positive, but I think the 1-player mode is wonderful. In all honesty I've spent maybe 30 minutes in multi-player mode but countless hours playing by myself - Great game!

I think a lot of people gave it poor single-player reviews because once the puzzle gets too big for the DS screen and you have to scroll around it is impractical to use the touch-screen anymore. It's hard to explain unless you actually play it but if you use the D-pad and the buttons you can actually solve the bigger puzzles much faster and enjoy the game a lot more. If you only use the touch-pen for the bigger puzzle it is tedious and not very much fun.

It is only $20, and for the price and the amount of fun I had playing it I rank it as a must have for the DS.

played every puzzle and all downloadables

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I totally got addicted to this game as my first ds puzzle game. I played every puzzle and all the ones that you download from nintendo. The biggest puzzles were the most fun, but they're all great. My only complaint is that after playing them all, I wanted more, so I tried to connect with other people and play against them (an endless supply of puzzles!). But every time it would say there was a problem with the connection and I automatically win. I won 8 times without ever actually playing. Then I gave up. I plan to try again in hopes of a better connection.

Addictive and Fun Puzzle Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Picross DS
Picross is incredibly an addictive and challenging puzzle game. I'd never played it before, but got hooked immediately. The nice thing about it is you don't need to know anything about how to play before you start. It give you instructions and starts you off with simple puzzles. But as you progress, the puzzles become more difficult and you really have to use your analytical skills to solve them.

A fantastic logic game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Picross DS is one of the best games I have found for the DS. It is, essentially, a logic puzzle: based on what you do know, you have to extrapolate where squares must be, as well as where squares can't possibly be. There is also the extra cheat of knowing that you are creating a picture, and so, in some cases, you might even be able to pull off an educated guess based on the forming image.

Since you do start off with simple images on 10x10 grids, you have several easy puzzles in which you can learn the basic logical tenets of the game. After which you move up until you are working on 20x25 grids.

There are even two modes of difficulty - one where the game will tell you that you've picked the wrong square, and one where the game gives no indication that you are right or wrong, other than to relight numbers for a full row or column that has an error in it.

Picross DS has a few other modes that, I must admit, I rarely ever fiddle with. The only one I have tried is making your own Picross design. I have not found that mode to be especially satisfying, so I have not tried it very often. This most certainly does not detract from my rating of this game, however. Whether or not this feature works in this game makes me no never mind.

The only thing I will complain about is the fact that once you solve a puzzle, the picture of the puzzle remains as that puzzle's selection icon. So now you know what image you are going for, and all of a sudden you're making more educated guesses than logical choices. This is not the end of the world, but it would be nice to be able to delete the puzzle images.

In any case, if you enjoy logic puzzles, this game is SO for you!

Great puzzle game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 15, 2008
Author: Amazon User

My husband gave me Picross DS as a stocking stuffer last Christmas. At first I was a little hesitant to try it because I didn't know about the game and I thought I would have to draw. He said it's kind of like Sudoku, which I like a lot, so I gave it a chance. It has a tutorial when you first play the game. Walks you through everything and you can try basic puzzles until you get the hang of it. After a few practices, I started liking it a lot and got addicted to it. There are quite a lot of puzzles from Beginner to Advanced or Expert, and Bonus Level. I felt some sort of accomplishment when I finished all of the puzzles but I'm not very happy I don't have puzzles to play anymore, except the ones online (I think about 2-3 daily). Puzzles online are good also and some have time limits so it's a bit different.

Overall, this is a must have game for those who like puzzle games. Those who like to think and practice their mind. I loved Picross DS.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 Next 

Actions